compelling "points" both in feature and
body, new and surprising suggestions of inbred fineness totally at
variance with the unhemmed white drill trousers and uncouth shoes. And
then, while he was nodding to himself, he realized that the boy was not
looking down into the town in the valley.

Chin in palm, elbow upon knee, Steve was gazing fixedly in the
direction of Dexter Allison's stucco and timber "summer lodge," and
although Caleb could not have known it, there had been no need for his
silence, for the boy's rapt preoccupation was sound-proof. Caleb heard
voices coming from behind the shrubbery and just as he, a little
perplexed, turned to follow the direction of that fascinated gaze,
Allison himself squeezed through a narrow aperture in the box hedge and
hailed him jovially from the far edge of the lawn. And Caleb Hunter's
brows drew together in a bit of a frown when a slender figure in kilted
black velvet and bright-buckled low shoes, hatless and with thick,
gleaming hair bobbed short in a style strange to Morrison in those
days, flashed through behind him. For Caleb heard the short gasp which
came from the boy's lips, even before the little girl had paused in her
darting advance, on tip-toe like a hovering butterfly, to wave a slim
hand at him.

Caleb heard the boy's breath suck in between tight teeth; heard it
quiver unsteadily as she appeared on swift feet--and Caleb understood
what had been holding so closely his attention. He understood
absolutely and yet, strange as the mood was, at that moment he couldn't
help but feel, too, somehow a little sorry for the boy--he couldn't
help but think---- His eyes went from Steve's forward thrust head,
from the hair shaggy and unkempt for all its fineness and thickness and
wavy softness, across to that dainty vision which, poised in her
absurdly short skirt like a point of flame, was already gazing back at
the boy upon the steps in open and undisguised amaze.

All of that characteristic which had been most pronounced in Dexter
Allison, the latter had passed down to this slender girl who was his
daughter, Barbara. No matter how vivid Allison's raiment had been,
Caleb remembered that even when Dexter was a stripling at school, it
had always seemed more a part of the man himself, than just protection
for his body. Caleb had never given it a serious thought up to that
moment, but now it came back to him with added cumulative force. He
recollected that he had often